In general, a semiconductor manufacturing facility is a facility that selectively and repeatedly performs processes such as etching, diffusion, chemical vapor deposition, ion injection, and metal deposition on a wafer.
Etching, diffusion, and chemical vapor deposition of the processes performed by a semiconductor manufacturing facility are processes that inject a process gas into a sealed process chamber under a predetermined atmosphere so that the process gas reacts with a wafer in the process chamber. Most of semiconductor manufacturing processes are performed under vacuum and the vacuum should be maintained at a predetermined level to perform precise semiconductor manufacturing processes.
Pressure is a very important factor in processes of manufacturing semiconductor devices and, low pressure, for example, a low vacuum or high vacuum state, is required for most semiconductor manufacturing processes.
A different degree of vacuum is required for each of semiconductor manufacturing processes and one or more vacuum pumps are used, depending on the required degrees of vacuumization, to evacuate a process gas from a process chamber.
For example, a pumping apparatus is necessarily required to lower the pressure inside a process chamber or maintain a process chamber at low pressure in a heat treatment process such as deposition or diffusion of semiconductor manufacturing processes, and a vacuum pump that produces a vacuum using torque from a rotor is generally used as the pumping apparatus.
A vacuum pump usually includes a cylindrical pump housing body and a pump housing base coupled to the lower end of the pump housing body. Further, a motor is disposed at the center, a rotor is rotatably coupled to the driving shaft of the motor, and a stator is disposed around the rotor.
Accordingly, when the rotor is rotated by the motor, a high vacuum pressure is generated between screws having opposite angles to the stator, so a gas remaining in a process chamber is smoothly discharged by the vacuum pressure.
When operating to generate vacuum pressure, a vacuum pump generates high heat, so cooling apparatuses having various cooling methods or cooling structures are used to protect vacuum pumps from high heat.
For example, various cooling apparatuses for a vacuum pump have been disclosed in Korean Patent Nos. 10-1120887, 10-0517788, and 10-1129774.
Therefore, an aspect of the preset invention is to provide a cooling apparatus for a vacuum pump that can effectively cool a vacuum pump under a high-heat environment.